The thing I appreciate the most about a device like this is that it's largely self-contained. I can program my phone in Python, sure, but I largely can't program my phone in Python on the phone. There are tools which do this, but the device isn't optimized for it, and the usage metaphor isn't really compatible - coding UI applications with a soft keyboard doesn't sound fun or useful.

On the other hand, getting a text-based REPL that I can quickly enter some commands on is great - that was why I really loved TI-BASIC on my TI-83. In college it made it easy to write a small program, roughly when I needed that program. In one extreme example, my girlfriend and I took ours to the grocery store every week, and used a BASIC app I wrote for meal planning for the week (this was pre-smartphone era).

I'd hope that this is _something_ of an answer to the concern that computing is getting too complicated and detached. Just thinking about the near-ubiquity of the TI-83 when I was in high school, giving kids the ability to code out of their pockets without having to worry about UI mechanics, publishing to an app store, or _threads_ even (AFAIK Android throws exceptions if you do certain things on the main thread), sounds pretty powerful.